Orbis Cascade Alliance Dashboard

The Hub is one program of the pre-existing Orbis Cascade Alliance.  The Hub serves only Alliance members at this time.

The Alliance, a 25 year-old organization,  is governed by a 39-member Council composed of the dean or director of each member institution. The Council holds authority over the Alliance’s budget and strategic initiatives. The Board of Directors is elected from Council and has fiduciary responsibility and supports activity between Council meetings.

The Alliance has five program areas advised by Teams: Collaborative Workforce, Discovery, Resource Sharing, Systems, and Unique & Local Content. Teams are composed of employees of Alliance libraries and are appointed by the Board.

Teams work with small groups of experts drawn from both full Alliance member libraries and other cultural heritage institutions that participate in services available to non-members. Standing groups support ongoing services and program offerings; project groups work short-term to address a particular problem, need, or question.

Examples of work done by groups includes the creation and maintenance of documentation and training, creation and modification of best practices based on national and international standards, and engaging in deep study of an issue in order to advise the ULC Team on The Alliance has an appropriate structure for ensuring good governance that includes both members and non-members in appropriate ways.

In the future, we will examine models and possibilities of expanding services to other organizations in our geographic areas who are not Alliance members.

Metadata standards, tools for metadata cleanup, review for adherence to standards.

Our approach to this work is decentralized and relies on institutional compliance with the Dublin Cores Best Practices and remediation and/or enrichment that can be performed in the harvester. Harvester contributions are checked and validated by the harvester (e.g. if dates are missing it will not accept the contribution) and spot-checked by the ULC Program Manager for elements most suited for human review (e.g. formatting of circa dates, creators formed according to RDA). Contributing institutions receive feedback and correction requests via email, with one-on-one support via phone or videoconference available as needed.